My dissertation chair asked me that question after our conversation about the frustrations I was having in school. While I was doing well, I had no solid idea of who I was outside of my program, because I felt like much of my identity up to that point had been created for me. I was working at a job in higher education where I felt undervalued, in a PhD program of Educational Leadership at University of Redlands that I didn’t believe I deserved to be in (I never saw myself as smart,) and I was struggling with understanding what it meant to be both Black and queer, because I believed that I had never been given the space in my life to make sense of my own intersections.

I can recall the times in my life where I was the most fragile. I have always struggled with navigating the intersections of both my Black and queer identity. Education rarely made space for me to contend with the struggles I had as a queer Black man. Reflecting on those moments of fragility, I realized that I often used education as a way to block out the real work I needed to do around the insecurities related to my identity.

Though I wasn’t familiar with Audre Lorde and her work, I quickly learned that this woman would come to be one of my greatest teachers. She helped me understand elements of my lived experience in ways that no other educator ever could.

Audre Lorde is truly the one who taught me how to love myself fully.

The work of Audre Lorde was dedicated to many of the things I needed at that moment in time. Lorde was not only a poet, but a self described “warrior”. She dedicated her life and creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism and homophobia, all things that I had experienced in my own journey. Up to this point in my life, I had never found literary work that celebrated one’s intersectional existence. Lorde did this in her work, explaining that not only was her sexuality part and parcel of who she was as a Black woman, but that her work spoke to the intersections of her world.

"When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak."

Lorde’s work spoke to me because much of it spoke to healing the anger I carried as a queer Black person. One of my greatest struggles was negotiating what the world wanted me to be, and who I truly wanted to become. There is so much demand from both the queer community and the Black community to look and act a certain way. But even worse are the demands from the world that want me to speak about the injustices I experience in a calm and kind manner.

Lorde taught me that self-love means allowing yourself to feel; allowing yourself to stand in your truth no matter how painful it might be, while using anger as a method to process said pain.

She taught me that I had the right to speak out about the pain that both the Black and queer community had caused me, while recognizing that protecting others’ feelings would in fact cost me my own. The ways my family had used religion to harm me. The ways toxic masculinity, patriarchy, and white supremacy never allowed me to see myself whole.

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From moments when people would make comments about my effeminate demeanor or tell me that I needed to act “more manly,” Lorde’s work allowed me to interrogate my own truth and the power to actively speak out about that oppression, and what it means to fully challenge a world that was never built for me to exist in.

Examining her work allowed me the opportunity of self-exploration, to speak openly about the pain I experienced in the world, specifically in moments where I live both anti-Black and anti-queer experiences.

Her work allowed me to understand what it means to be “free” because I was now able to see, touch and affirm my hurt. Through her words, “I have lived it, and survived it,” I was now able to share my truth unapologetically with a world that was actively working to silence me.

Since my earliest memories, one of the toughest battles I’ve fought is negotiating how to live in a world that only validates my existence at the margins of both my Black and queer identity. The greatest battle has always been centered in finding my true self in communities that don’t allow for my identities to coexist, or allow me space to speak freely about what I experience as a Black queer man.

This truth meant being okay with the idea that I have never been okay. Speaking openly about the pressures that are put on Black queer people to perform. How I actively wore a mask of joy while silently dancing with the idea of death.

For years, I wanted to end the pain. I had spent so many years of my life grappling with the idea that people often got to see and hear the pain I experienced as a Black queer person, but never wanted to actively help me resolve it.

I never spoke openly about wanting to end my life because this is a known taboo in the Black community, and I didn’t want to be another statistic in the queer community. But Lorde’s work taught me that the best way to love myself in each of these moments was to embrace my “litany for survival” and speak openly about what it feels like to hold others accountable for not giving me space in the Black or the queer community to thrive. In this moment, I began to understand that self-love meant speaking your truth regardless of how uncomfortable it makes others feel.

What Lorde taught me about self-love is that it means giving myself permission to help myself first in a world that demands marginalized people to take care of others. Her work helped me to understand that self-love is a radical, subversive act that allows me to center what I want most out of life.

It also reminds me that I have a right to see myself as whole and that I have no obligation to this world other than being the person that I define.

Audre Lorde taught me that I have a right to love who I am.

Dr. Jonathan P. Higgins currently serves as Campus Pride’s Curriculum Educator, and is a Lambda Literary writing fellow as well as a regular contributor to Presence.IO and Efniks.

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